i'm kinda tired n stuff now but i'll post about my brother and why there is no hope for him. first of all, we DO have a lot in common. in some ways he's exactly like me...when i was under the age of ten. he's FOURTEEN. when i was fourteen...well, ok, i was holed up in my room dressed alternately in the 2 black outfits i had at the time, obsessively drawing roses and writing shitty poetry and listening to Cradle of Filth and refusing to eat. BUT that was relatively normal for my age...stop laughing please.
anywho, the signs were all over the place from the moment my brother was born that he's just...weird. he's always been a very picky eater. anyone who knows my brother knows all about it. i can actually list the foods he doesn't refuse to eat or hasn't refused to eat in the past, and because i can, i will (plus it will serve to demonstrate just how weird this kid is): macaroni, rice and french fries, all of which must be layered with salt. also, corn chips, tho they must be salted. when he was little he used cream cheese with chives for dip but now he just eats the chips. also, hot dogs - but only a certain brand of organic chicken dogs, and just plain, not even a bun (he won't eat bread or anything that resembles it). he eats two of said hot dogs evey single night. he used to eat fish sticks but i guess he doesn't anymore. also, peanut butter crackers, but only on oyster crackers with a certain kind of peanut butter, and it has to be chunky. then a few fruits and vegetables - apples but only cut up and peeled, carrots but only cut into matchsticks, cucumbers but only in slices, celery and grapes. and then for breakfast sometimes he'll eat raw oats with chocolate chips, or if we have none, shaved chocolate...i think thats it. well, and desserts, but if its cake he only eats the frosting and if its ice cream only vanilla with sprinkles or something and in a cup. good thing the little booger appreciates good cookies or else some real hurting would be in order.
when my brother was in third grade, he wrote every single vocabulary sentence about our dog. eventually the teacher had a talk with mom and dad and they had to make him do his homework several times over before he could turn it in because he wouldn't stop writing about the damn dog.
my parents wouldn't let us have any modern forms of entertainment (i was in junior high when we got our first tv with a remote controller. before that we had the kind with the dials. as it is, our one tv is only 13 inches). so when my brother begged for a gameboy of course he didn't get it. so he'd amuse himself for hours on end by drawing "cannons" facing each other on the top and bottom of a piece of paper and then make them "shoot" each other by starting his pencil at the "barrels" of one of the cannons and bearing down on it, making a line of "fire" to the other side of the page, then scribbling out anything he hit. he did this for years. there were papers everywhere covered with this shit. he made the very near fatal mistake of holding one of his "battles" on the inside back cover of one of my notebooks. sometimes he could coerce someone into playing the "bad guys" and playing one side of his scribble-battles, usually my dad, because he's lame, but you'll get to hear me rant about him the next time he pisses me off, so you probly won't have to wait long.
NOTE: also a rant about my parents' apparent fear of technology at a later time...seriously, its fucked up around here. i'm surprised i'm sitting in front of this computer.
well, luckily for my brother he eventually picked up a couple of local paper routes, so he's allowed to buy things like gameboys now because he's got his own money. he won't do one of the routes tho, so my mom does it for him. (my mom never really helps in these situations with my brother...at least she keeps the money from her route.)
when Pokemon first came out, my brother was all over it. i encouraged his collection of Magic cards, as i tend to respect people who can play Magic, i never got the hang of it no matter how many times people tried to teach me. (i stole lots of his cards and put them up on my wall till he started playing in tournaments and needed them back - i just like the pictures.) but then he jumped on the Pokemon bandwagon. instead of being totally mystified and confused by the concept as i had been with Magic, i beat him the first and only time i ever played. holy shit did i beat him. it got worse tho. then he fell into the Digimon trap. Pokemon, tho juvenile and weak, is better than Digimon, because Pokemon's the original. the only excuse i can make for Digimon is they can look pretty cool when they're in ultimate and have funny ten syllable names, cuz their names just get longer as they grow. BUT THEN...Yu Gi Oh. oh shit. a show with a corresponding card game thats ABOUT A FUCKING CARD GAME. ("Yu Gi Oh rots the brain!" - James, the kickass guy at the game store in the mall who can find ANYTHING.) so my brother jumps on that too. i figure theres still hope at the time, he really is a bright kid despite being a total weirdo, and might figure out how retarded Yu Gi Oh is.
rewind to a couple years ago. my brother discovers a seemingly harmless series of books, the Redwall series, about an abbey of armor-wearing mice and other rodents that fight similarly clothed foxes and weasels. my mom read them out loud to him for the longest time and oh god how i hated that. all the characters have fucked up accents, and its written like that too, to the point where you can't even understand the dialogue you're reading. so now my brothers got all the books and has read each one at least five times, he's almost never without one. then PBS launches an animated show about it. then comes the website. what time my brother didn't spend playing Diablo and Starcraft or looking up cheats to said games, he spent on Redwall sites....
ok, for the next part to make the impact on you that it made on me, you have to know what furries are. look em up. i do not have a favorable opinion of furries, as they tend to be totally delusional and sick. also, think of that Disney version of Robin Hood, the one where they're all anthropomorphic foxes and chickens and lions and whatever. did that disturb you as a child? it really really REALLY disturbed me, i just hate anthropomorphic animals like that (like Redwall too). furries tend to get turned on by this.
so i come into the computer room one day to kick my brother off the computer, and he's talking on AIM with someone labeled in his buddy list as "best friend." turns out its just some freak he met on the Redwall sites. since i've learned that hard way that lots of people online are NOT your friends, i told him to stop being a loser and people he meets online cannot be his "best friend." (no offense to MY net friends, if you're here. if you are my friend who i met online, i know for sure you're who you say you are, etc. but you know what i mean. and my brother doesn't have much common sense - in fact he's so low on it he won't even learn from MY mistakes and shit i've made a lot.) plus, this "best friend" has a buddy icon of 2 cartoon kitties in love. and their sn is AngelKitten some number, and then i'm informed they're MALE. nothing against effeminate guys here, but thats fucked up, thats just really really fucked up. i guess (i hope) they're around the same age as my brother. i started yelling at my brother to stop talking to people like that and shit, then we showed him some of David Gonterman's horrifying furry art, my brother told me it was fucked up and sick and i thought he might be ok. but now he's having daily chats with those Redwall people where they roleplay and say shit like "i have the power!" "what power?" "the power to turn into a pup!" like it makes them special that they pretend to be a magic wolf that can change its age. then they play "games" like tag and "spin the stick" which is apparently spin the bottle only more retarded. i know they're all around my brothers age cuz when the question of "what do we do if it lands on a girl and i'm a girl?" was answered by "spin again silly!" i'll give my brother credit for having better typing skills than all the other Redwall furries combined, but then i take away that credit because he enjoys chatting with retarded kids who never learned how to use a keyboard and like to pretend they're magic animals.

and thus ends the story of why my brother is hopeless. its a long and fucked up tale. you can't blame me for trying to sell him all my life.